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Praise for Twisted Tales Events

'In the past few years Twisted Tales has become a major force in the promotion and appreciation of horror fiction. As well as putting on author readings and signings at bookshops it has expanded into organising larger events, bringing authors and critics together for discussions of the field. I've been involved in quite a few of both and have found them hugely enjoyable and stimulating - I believe the audiences did as well. May Twisted Tales continue to grow and prosper! If you love the field, support them! I do.' - Ramsey Campbell

‘Twisted Tales consistently produce well-organised events for writers and readers of horror. What really distinguishes Twisted Tales for me is the intelligent themes and investigations they pursue, and the high quality of the discussions they always stimulate. As an author I've been invited to three of their events and have been pleasantly startled, to near shocked, by the attendance levels - two out of three were even sold out. I salute anyone who contributes so much to the literary and cultural life of horror fiction.’- Adam Nevill

'Twisted Tales events are wonderful... a great way of promoting 21st century horror fiction. Supported by Waterstone's Liverpool One and really well organised, Twisted Tales brings together established names in the genre as well as new voices and of course readers. Looking forward to much more to come...' - Alison J. Littlewood

Thursday, 28 June 2012

Dark Harvest: Legacy of Frankenstein reviewed by Tim Franklin

Dark Harvest: Legacy of Frankenstein
Written by Iain Lowson
Published by Cubicle 7
Released in 2011

Flesh is freaky. Humans are sacks of meat and offal suspended from frames of
articulated bone. Diseases make us leaky. Old age makes us creak. The natural
world contains abundant tools to dismantle our frail chassis. Human ingenuity
has invented many more. So it’s no wonder that we are afraid of our bodies. We
wouldn’t feel physical pain if we didn’t have bodies. They’re embarrassing.
Sweaty, noisome and oozing. No matter the effort we invest preserving them,
they slowly give in to decrepitude and ruin, then death. In a word, our bodies
are treacherous. This is the sticky, throbbing heart of Dark Harvest.

Being a pen and paper role-playing-game,
there is a certain dissonance between theme and the play experience. The
stories you tell in the game revolve around body horror, but playing the game
is all about talking and rolling dice. Dark Harvest runs on a
streamlined version of the Victoriana rule system. If a player
wants to achieve something they roll a pool of white six-sided dice, the size
of which depends on a list of controlling attributes and skills. Ones and sixes
in the results are good. The Game Master can throw in black six-sided dice to
the pool to represent how difficult the task the player is attempting is; ones
and sixes on these subtract from successes. It’s a light and inoffensive system
without any thematic weight which fades into the background quickly during
play. You could play Dark Harvest with a different rule set and
lose little from the experience. Whether that is a problem for you depends on
how deeply you want the central theme of a game to be embedded in the system
that shapes play.

If the rules are dry, the setting is oozing in thematic gore, in a way that is
in part a literary “what-if”, and part alternate history. Pen and paper RPGs
drink deeply from the established literary genres, borrowing tropes left and
right to build their worlds, and many wear their heritage proudly on their
sleeve: Vampire: The Masquerade (White Wolf, 1992) is a love-letter
to Anne Rice, Dungeons and Dragons (Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson, 1974)
is neck-deep in the oeuvre of Robert E. Howard and Tolkein, and Traveller (Games
Design Workshop, 1977) continues the visions of Isaac Asimov and Arthur C.
Clarke. Dark Harvest is a shade peculiar. It explicitly continues
the tale of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, but translocates the good
doctor forwards a century and puts him in charge of a country on the eve of
World War One. What emerges is compelling and rich with horrific potential, but
it’s hardly connected to its source material.

If Doctor Victor Frankenstein had
a country, what would it be? It rather depends on your sense of Frankenstein. In
Dark Harvest we see one version of the doctor. Escaping the death
that befalls him at the end of Mary Shelley’s opus, Frankenstein uses the
incredible revivification serum to extend his life for a century, working
behind the scenes of European grand politic. He assumes the mantle of the king
of Romania and begins a reunification process that ends with the formation of a
terrifying new state, Promethea. This land, with its closed borders and
draconian security services, is the perfect place to extend the reach of
Frankenstein’s obscene science with research unfettered by the morals of lesser
men. This gives the game a very fixed
scope and stage. Player’s will either fight for or oppose Frankenstein’s
regime. Its influence is so pervasive in the setting that there is no room for
orthogonal explorations, or side conflicts between different parties that
merely happen to exist in the same world. If you don’t take to the setting and
the central tension (between Frankenstein’s scientific idealism and common human
decency) you may find that you don’t get many sessions out of the game.

Curiously, I found that the
political milieu of Dark Harvest provides a richer seam of
inspiration for telling stories than the bare fact of Frankenstein’s
superscience. The default timeline sets the game a couple of years before the
onset of the Great War. Promethea has been overlooked by the great powers so
far, which are engaged in biting one another’s necks. The country is positively
boiling with monstrous secrets which, if unveiled before the world, could have
grotesque ramifications for the course of human history. With resistance groups
active in the country (led by a certain, century-old monster, familiar to
movie-goers everywhere), there is ample space to explore the uneven warfare
between an oppressed proletariat and a brutal state, or the role of foreign
agents distrusted by all and desperate for political gain. The outsider looking
in also gives a perfect introduction to the world and allows the horrors of
Frankestein’s regime to be revealed bit by bit. Frontloading the player with
that information would rather spoil the surprise. Extending a game of Dark
Harvest into Weird War One is a juicy prospect - and also outside the
scope of the main book.

Class warfare is a strong theme
in the default Victoriana setting. Unusually for an RPG, your class
in Victoriana is not Rogue, Fighter or Thief, it’s Upper, Middle or
Lower. This foregrounds one element of Victorian society and provides rich fuel
for some of the game’s main conflicts, with characters joining in strike action
and proletarian uprisings or negotiating the viper’s nest of high society
deal-making. For Dark Harvest, the
class conflict dial is turned up to eleven.

With Frankenstein’s genius unbound from financial and ethical constraints,
every perversion becomes possible. The most pervasive of these is the titular
Dark Harvest. The citizens of Promethea do not own their own flesh. Using the
same technology that gave Frankenstein his unnatural lifespan, it is possible
for members of the ruling class to claim the choicest body parts from the
people below them on the social ladder and add them to their own bodies,
swapping away their blemishes, weaknesses and flaws. Lucky peasants will get a
defective spare as a replacement, while others are left to die. This is
simultaneously a hammy horror conceit and an astute metaphor for power dynamics
in a capitalist economy.

There are more gauche excesses. One extreme form of capital punishment is
evisceration, a mix between torture and Damien Hurst art installation. Victims
are mounted to a frame and then treated with Frankenstein’s life-extending
serum. Then they are dismantled, piece by piece, still quite alive. This
extreme body-horror is a little bit 1980s. Historical regimes have been capable
of similar excesses of brutality, but for an element in a horror game it is a
little troublesome. Once the evisceration is out of the bag, what have you got
left to shock with? (This is perhaps the questions that The Human Centipede (2009)
was attempting to answer).

The positive aspect to Promethean science is in Augmentations. These are
biological super powers arising from body transplants. Your character might
have the eyes of a hawk or the strength of a bear, gills, or venom glands. You
may be pursued by a biologically engineered huntsman with an unnatural sense of
smell and the strength of ten men. A lot of intellectual energy has been
invested making these an easy, plug and play element of the system, which is
good and bad in equal measure: good, if you like to mix horror, pulp and
awesome powers, and bad if you already sick of games that say they are about
political intrigue or psychological horror but invest half their page count
into lists of superpowers (for reference, see the entire publication library of
White Wolf Publishing). Dark Harvest would be an excellent starting
point if you wanted to play a game set in the Bioshock (2K Boston, 2007)
universe. Similarly, the ability to create wolfmen and hunchbacks ensures
Promethea is roaming with every stock monster in the Gothic library.

So the interpretation of Frankenstein in
Dark Harvest is more Hammer Horror than Mary Shelley. You could
make room for a melancholic meditation on the morality of creation, the
insecurity of masculine science, the divinity of humankind, or the perpetual
battle of nature versus nurture, but there is nothing inherent to this game
that supports that kind of investigation or those themes of play. Dark
Harvest is extroverted, concerned with outsides, matter not mind,
flesh not spirit. Promethean by White Wolf went more deeply into
the subjectivity of the monster, tasking players with wandering the earth in a
quest to rise from monster to mortal. But there’s no need to make any thematic
transplants. Slapping around the fake gore and greasepaint in Dark Harvest is
chilling as it is.

Tim Franklin has recently arrived in the Black
Country and is setting up as a freelance literature project coordinator. He has
completed a course in playwriting at the Liverpool Everyman Theatre, and a
collection of reviews and mad railings at the government can be found at his
blog, Unsuitable
for Adults. He's a gamer, and that's where his interest in horror is most keenly
focused. He has contributed a co-authored article with Pete Wolfendale, ‘Kant
on the Borderlands’, for the collection Dungeons and Dragons and Philosophy (forthcoming
Autumn 2012).